Your college years will be the best years of your life.

I really couldn’t put a figure on how many times I heard that as I graduated high school. I doubted the people who, with plastic smiles and warm memories of Animal House-esque college days gone by, passed this cliche along to 18-year-old me, terrified about leaving the security of high school and starting over.

I’m a senior now, and these past four years have been some of the best years I’ve experienced. And they’ve been some of the most confusing, saddest, most challenging and loneliest years I’ve ever known.

I’ve lost a grandma, my first love, a best friend. I’ve had to try things that scared the living daylights out of me. I’ve made mistakes I can’t undo. I’ve suffered moments I never felt more alone.

But this is no pity party. I floated through high school without a single actual problem. So-and-so didn’t ask me to the dance. My friend and I fought over who would get to buy the sweater we both wanted.

Never did anything happen to me that qualified as something to be genuinely upset over. Here at college, I know pain for the first time, but I would never go back to my ignorantly blissful teenage days. With an increased awareness of pain, I have gained a deeper ability to know joy.

The two are intimately connected. Author Gerald May writes in his book, The Awakened Heart, “Even in the bliss of love there is a certain exquisite pain: the pain of too much beauty, of overwhelming magnificence … In both joy and pain, love is boundless. The hurt, loss, disappointment, and confusion we feel open us up to the sea of wonder, pleasure, gifts and love that life is spilling over into our cups.

My roommates and I used to sit around in our living room last year, books open in our laps in the pretense of studying, and we would discuss life’s mysteries.

We interpreted and analyzed the actions of the guys we liked. We pooled our collective second-hand knowledge about what it’s like to start a career or get married.

We laughed until our stomachs ached. We danced. And we cried. We sobbed over scholarships lost, broken families, dying friendships and rejections.

The experience of sharing our joys and hurts together is my sweetest memory at Eastern.

The first semester of my sophomore year, I lived in Ford Hall in a room by myself and watched a friendship that had lasted over a decade slip out of my fingers. Hating to be alone, sad and lonely, I cried rivers, and no one knew. I could never have appreciated the nights with my best friends in apartment 15 relaying the most recent drama to the depth that I did if I had never spent that semester alone in Ford Hall.

Who treasures the `A’ on a test more? The person who never has to study or the person whose experienced the heartache of studying hard and still falling short?

Who holds another’s heart with more care and tenderness-someone who has never dared to date or someone whose own heart has been dropped? I don’t know if I think college is the best time of my life. I imagine that, as I go from here, start a career, marry and have children, life will become harder and more complicated.

The knowledge I have of pain will deepen.

But with that, the awareness I have of joy will saturate me far more than I ever dreamed of while hypothesizing about the future in Apartment 15.

n Erika Larson is a senior English major and a monthly columnist for The Daily Eastern News. Her e-mail address is eslarson@eiu.edu. Columns are the opinion of the author.